Reel History UK

13/03/2023

Pirates of the Caribbean
~Anakin Shadowhunter

08/11/2022

Kelvin Harrison, Jr. plays a 18th century French-Caribbean violinist and composer who took the Parisian music scene by storm in "Chevalier."

18/10/2022

EXCLUSIVE: Olga Kurylenko-starrer (Black Widow) Boudica has wrapped shoot in the UK for Bleiberg Entertainment, which has today revealed an official first look image from the movie. Writer-director…

03/10/2022

First look at Will Smith in Antoine Fuqua’s ‘EMANCIPATION’.

11/09/2022

Toronto film festival: The Oscar winner leads a strong ensemble of Black women in a robustly entertaining drama about 19th century female warriors

09/09/2022

Check out the new trailer for Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire, an upcoming series debuting on October 2 on AMC, with the first two episodes available ...

06/09/2022

The legendary anti-war story returns to the screen with Daniel Brühl and director Edward Berger. Watch the trailer at Empire.

16/08/2022

German film director Wolfgang Petersen has died at age 81. He died peacefully Friday at his Brentwood residence from pancreatic cancer, in the arms of his wife of 50 years, Maria Antoinette. Peters…

06/08/2022

Map shows in which decade TV was officially introduced in each country. Source: buff.ly/2TeBVso

22/07/2022

Disney releases the first look at its upcoming family-friendly adventure series National Treasure: Edge of History at San Diego Comic-Con 2022.

07/07/2022

Viola Davis is no stranger to transformations. In the past couple years alone, she’s played DC’s Amanda Waller, Ma Rainey and even Michelle Obama. But in the warrior epic “The Wom…

05/07/2022

Considering how poorly Asian men are portrayed in Hollywood, I was genuinely surprised to learn about Sessue Hayakawa, a Japanese actor who became one of the biggest stars during the American silent era of the 1910s.

He became one of Hollywood’s first s*x symbols after starring in the film, The Cheat (1915) in which he plays a cruel villain (there’s a scene in which he literally brands a woman). Despite his portrayal, Hayakawa became extremely popular with American women for his “broodingly handsome” good looks. At one point, he was the highest paid actor in Hollywood (making over $3,500 a week), and his fame was on par with that of Charlie Chaplin.

Although, Hayakawa was highly sought after during the 1910s and early 1920s, he became disillusioned by constantly being typecast for the same roles. He decided to start his own production company to fight Asian stereotypes and ended up producing 23 films in a span of three years. However, he had to scrap his company after getting into an argument with a distributor who called him a racial slur.

By the 1930s, Hollywood had set strict moral guidelines called the Hays Code which prohibited in*******al love to be portrayed on screen. As a result, Hayakawa continued to be cast as either a villain or a “forbidden lover” since most of his costars were white women.

In 1937, Hayakawa went to France to star in a French film, but ended up being trapped in the country when World War 2 broke out. He sold watercolor paintings to financially support himself and joined the French resistance to help fight the Germans.

In 1949, Hayakawa—upon reflecting on his career—mentioned, "My one ambition is to play a hero".

He never really got that chance but did end up being nominated for best supporting actor for his role in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) in which he plays an “honorable villain” in charge of a Japanese prison camp in Thailand.

Upon retirement, Hayakawa became a Zen master and dedicated his life to Zen Buddhism. He died at the age of 87 in 1973.

29/06/2022

Searchlight Pictures has pulled back the curtain on “See How They Run,” the production company’s upcoming murder mystery starring a detective duo played by Sam Rockwell and Saoirs…

27/06/2022

It’s June 27, 1912… 🕰 ⁣♥️
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23/06/2022

Happy 70th birthday to actor Graham Greene, born June 22, 1952, on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario. Seen here in his Oscar-nominated performance as Kicking Bird in DANCES WITH WOLVES, Greene has a career that's spanned more than 40 years and has included films such as THUNDERHEART, MAVERICK, DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE, THE GREEN MILE, SKINS, TRANSAMERICA, and WIND RIVER, as well as television series such as NORTHERN EXPOSURE, THE RED GREEN SHOW, LONGMIRE, and GOLIATH. Once when asked if he felt he'd been typecast over the course of his career, he replied, "I've played all kinds of things. I played an old Jewish man in a furniture store in theater, I played the ghost of a Black transvestite...I've played British soldiers, I've played French soldiers, I've played New York cops, I've played lawyers, so...no."

16/06/2022

His failed attempts to bring the Emmett Till tragedy to television forced him to get creative

11/06/2022

Biopic of Tove Jansson, the renowned Finnish artist, author and creator of the Moomins.

07/06/2022

On this day, 7 June 1954, British mathematician and pioneering thinker in the field of artificial intelligence Alan Turing died of cyanide poisoning at the age of 41. Turing had also helped the Allies win World War II by decoding encrypted N**i communications, and after the war helped develop some of the earliest digital computers.
In 1952, he was convicted of "gross indecency" for homos*xuality and sentenced to chemical castration by the state as punishment. His death was officially ruled a su***de, in response to the persecution he had been suffering.
However, the police investigation of his death was entirely inadequate. And while they concluded he deliberately ingested cyanide from an apple, they failed to test the apple for the presence of cyanide. Alternative explanations for his death were that he could have accidentally inhaled cyanide from an experiment, or that British security services killed him to prevent state secrets being passed on to the Soviet Union, which was a common fear held about LGBT+ people whom they typically considered a security risk.
Years of campaigning against the legacy of UK state homophobia eventually resulted in Turing receiving a posthumous pardon in 2013, as well as the passing of the so-called Turing's Law, which granted posthumous pardons to nearly 50,000 other men convicted of "gross indecency" for same-s*x relations.
This Pride month, learn more LGBT+ history in our podcast series: https://workingclasshistory.com/tag/lgbtq/

30/05/2022

21/05/2022

21/05/2022

Mary Anning was born on this day in 1799.

Anning was famous around the world for her groundbreaking discoveries of dinosaur fossils in Lyme Regis. Her life was the focus of the recent film 'Ammonite' with Kate Winslet starring as the pioneering fossil collector and palaeontologist.

Learn more ➡️ https://bit.ly/39uBq7J

16/04/2022

New image of Joaquin Phoenix as Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte on the set of Ridley Scott’s new movie, “Napoleon". [ source: Daily Mail ]

08/04/2022

16/02/2022

15/02/2022

Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land are rightly hailed as masterworks – but they unfairly overshadow the year's other great books, writes John Self.

23/01/2022

13/10/2021

The official trailer for is here! The Disney+ original docuseries, directed by Peter Jackson, will be arriving on Disney+ just in time for...

08/10/2021

Director Jonathan Glazer is one of the true visionaries to have emerged in the film circuit the last decade. After all, his ultra-stylized 2000 gangster film “Sexy Beast” turned heads for its stunning visual palette However, Glazer only got better after that, having given us only two films since...